Film critics, including Robbie Collin, hated The Paperboy at Cannes
last year, but he now can't wait to rewatch it ahead of its British release
at the end of this week.

The worst film I saw at the Cannes Festival last year was a thriller called The Paperboy. Readers of the film’s Wikipedia page may spot the claim that it received “the longest sustained standing ovation of the festival at 16 minutes”. As someone who was present at that screening, and the cacophonous quarter-hour of jeering, squawking and mooing that followed, I think Wikipedia may want to clarify its definition of ‘standing ovation’.

Watching a film bomb in real time at a European film festival is an experience like nothing else on Earth. Catcalls echo freely around the auditorium, while abandoned cinema seats snap back upright with a jolting ka-lunk. Communal boos swell and crash like waves. It comes at you from all directions; cinema in five-dimensional sneer-o-vision and scoff-o-rama.

It’s also as obnoxious as it is pointless, and British critics, it should be said, don’t tend to participate. But when you hear it you can’t ignore it, and so the strength of that audience reaction often ends up cementing yours: either bolstering your love for the film (as it did for me at Venice 2012, with the booing of Terence Malick’sTo The Wonder), or reconfirming that what you are watching is indeed a galloping dud.

So it was with The Paperboy, which was described after that screening as “lurid” (Kate Muir, The Times), “calamitous” (Xan Brooks, The Guardian) and “in the grand scheme of dogs’ dinners, a ten-course canine tasting menu with wine pairings” (me).

Yet here’s the thing. Ten months on from the chimpanzees’ tea party of The Paperboy’s Cannes premiere, Lee Daniels’ film is being released in British cinemas next week – and I can’t wait to re-watch it. The film is a loose adaptation of a crime novel by the American writer Pete Dexter, set in 1960s Florida, in which Zac Efron plays the teenage brother of a newspaper reporter investigating a Death Row case. He falls for the prisoner’s vampish girlfriend (Nicole Kidman), and against a moist backdrop of gator-infested swampland, the horn is emphatically and collectively got.

There are three key moments that raised hackles, and heckles. The first is a scene in which Efron is attacked by a jellyfish, and in order to neutralise the sting, Kidman enthusiastically pees on him. The second is a prison visit during which Kidman brings her boyfriend (John Cusack) to orgasm at 20 paces, by force of sheer sexual charisma. The third is Zac Efron prancing around in his underwear, which in all honesty is less of a moment than the entire film.

Will The Paperboy play differently outside of the festival hothouse? I hope so, but even if it doesn’t, at least it will have failed on its own loopy terms. Even so, it could be that The Paperboy is simply misunderstood in its own time. No less a film than Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) suffered the same fate. Last year, it was named the Greatest Film of All Time by Sight & Sound, but on its release, Hitchcock’s masterpiece was met with a barrage of bad-to-lukewarm reviews (Sight & Sound’s own critic bemoaned the “egg-shell thinness” of its plot).

Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy

In the intervening half-century, not a frame of Vertigo has changed – but we have. Its themes of dreams, obsessions and blurred identities resonate far more powerfully today than in the mid-20th century: maybe in 2067, cineastes will marvel at just how blinkered the likes of Brooks, Muir and I were, before excitedly deconstructing the weeing scene.

This is, of course, very different from flatly awful films that later find favour as camp classics. Or is it? In preparation for this article I decided to re-watch Paul Verhoeven’s notorious exploitation drama Showgirls (1995), which was panned on release and went on to become a late-night favourite with the so-bad-it’s-good crowd. That was the context in which I originally saw Showgirls as a student. A few weeks ago, I ordered the Blu-ray from the Netherlands (you can’t get it over here), settled down to watch some bona fide junk...and was blown away by the sickly vibrancy, moral trickiness and wicked satirical bite of this triumphant A Star is Born-riffing sleaze-‘em-up.

Perhaps the goodness or badness of a film isn’t up there on the screen at all: it’s something that steams off the audience themselves as a byproduct of the act of watching. It was David Hume, in his brilliantly trenchant essay Of The Standard of Taste, who told us: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” Hume wrote that in 1757, but it took two viewings of Verhoeven’s stripper movie to make me believe it.